Disco-Tech: DJs, PCs and the Battle for the Beat

Posted 08/02/2011 at 12:53pm | by Seamus Bellamy

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Since Ray Newbie first starting spinning disks for the masses via a spark-gap transmitter back in 1909, there’s been no shortage of innovation in the area of audio hardware development. By the time that Walter Winchell coined the term ‘Disk Jockey’ in 1935, people around the world were snatching both live and recorded music out of the air in dance halls, at work and in their homes.

1947 marked the opening of the world’s first dance club—Whiskey à Go-Go—that played nothing but pre-recorded music, and by 1955 DJ Bob Casey had brought the two turntable system for doling continuous tunes to the United States, rocking the socks off of the nation’s grateful teenyboppers. Since then, to the casual observer not much has changed. For decades, vinyl remained the king of dance clubs around the world, surviving even in the face of emerging formats such as audio cassettes, with artists like DJ Kool Herc unleashing a new way of mixing and manipulating tunes on the world’s music lovers and giving birth to Hip-Hop.

Six years later, Technics released their iconic SL-1200 MK2 turntable, a venerable piece of hardware that many DJs continue to use and covet to this day.

As glorious as the analog era was, it was only a matter of time before digital hardware and media started edging their way into the club and radio scene. By the early nineties, the growing popularity of CDs began to put a serious hurt on the sales of other physical formats, and the introduction of the MP3 file format near the end of the millennium began to put a serious amount of hurt on the production of other formats of recorded music. Despite this, vinyl, while not as readily available as it once was, was still heavily favored by working Disc Jockeys for the amount of control over the music that the media offered. Back in the day, Clinton Walford loved him some CDs, and for the longest time, the Victoria Canada-based DJ wouldn’t be seen dead at a gig without his collection in tow.

“I used to have a couple of large suitcases of very, very organized CDs,” Said Walford. “Blindfolded, I could put my hand into the case, pick out the CD that I wanted and then go ahead play what I was after. As great as that was, it was still too heavy.” With the number of regular gigs that Walford has on his dance card, weight matters.

When we sat down to talk with this past June, he was juggling a regular turn on the air with a local radio station, two nights a week at a pair of local night clubs as well as weddings, private parties and anything else that gets sent his way - which in a city with a lion’s share of tourists, a growing youth demographic including a ton of party-crazed college and university students, can be a lot. Add to this the occasional gig spinning as the opening act for groups like Men Without Hats on their last cross-country tour, and you can see why he’d rather not lug around more than he has to.

Fortunately, while the introduction of the MP3 file format was busy gleefully decimating the record industry’s profits at the turn of the millennium, it also, albeit less notably, considerably reduced the weight your average working DJ was forced to lug around from gig to gig. With their inherent portability and capacity to store thousands of songs on a single hard drive, many Disc Jockeys, Walford included, found the temptation to move their music collections on to a laptop simply too much to resist.

While a laptop might be ideally suited for the task of storing and playing music, a standard keyboard and trackpad offer precious little in the area of control when compared against traditional DJing hardware such as physical turntables and mixers. Not surprisingly, a niche market of software and hardware controllers cropped up almost overnight to meet the needs of laptop loving DJs.

One of the first, most innovative, of these controllers to market was Final Scratch—a software and hardware control solution that allows DJs to play back and tinker with digital audio by manhandling computer-connected turntables. Other developers followed down the trail blazed by the makers of Final Scratch, with titles such as Torq, FruitLoops (now known as FL Studio), Mixxx and Deckadance.  Typically, with DJ solutions like these, audio is cranked out by the DJ’s computer, leaving the turntables to be used as a controller for tasks such as beat matching, scratching and beat juggling.